


what happens to a memory that does not stay

by timber (calculus)



Category: SEVENTEEN (Band)
Genre: Ambiguous Relationships, Cats, Gen, Hanahaki Disease, M/M, Surrealism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-07
Updated: 2018-08-07
Packaged: 2019-06-23 08:36:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,760
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15602508
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/calculus/pseuds/timber
Summary: In floriography, 동백꽃 meanslonging.





	what happens to a memory that does not stay

**Author's Note:**

> don't think too heavily about it; it's all mumbo-jumbo in the end.

Wonwoo takes the same route home every day. They say that consistency and routine are the cornerstone of recovery after surgery, and Wonwoo follows the instructions of his doctors to the letter—even if he doesn’t actually remember why he needed them in the first place.

There are a couple of house cats that he likes to feed on his way home. They crowd around the post by one of the apartment buildings, curled up bodies sleeping on top one another until they catch sight of Wonwoo’s lanky body. He likes the orange one the best, even though he says firmly to himself that he loves all the cats equally; the orange one is just the cutest, though. He doesn’t know their names, so he calls them by his own in his head.

The black one is Yaongi for his loud cries whenever he catches sight of the tuna cans in Wonwoo’s hands. Coco is the long fluffy brown one with the constant unimpressed expression made by the two dotting spots on his maw. And, his favorite, Hana, with the orange-brown fur and the sweetest disposition ever.

He brings them the canned foods from his job bagging groceries at the local mart, the ones that are about expire and go to waste. He’s not actually sure if it’s good for the cats to be eating it, but the internet hasn’t lead him wrong just yet. Today’s meal is canned mackerel, which is Yaongi’s favorite and Hana’s least, but he has some leftover pieces of spam from his lunchbox just in case she decides to snub it.

The cats perk up when they hear his footsteps, a few hundred meters away, far enough that Wonwoo has to squint through his thick-rimmed glasses to even make out their bodies, and they greet him with ready cries and purring rubs against his legs.

It’s the best part of his day.

Hana reaches out first, gracefully pulling out from her folded position to nuzzle against Wonwoo’s ankles, and he drops down to his haunches immediately to pet her in response. She meows at him, sweet and reedy, and leans into his palm, lifting her neck so that he can slide down and scratch under her chin.

“Hello, Hana. Oppa’s here again with some nice fish,” Wonwoo murmurs lowly. He reaches his other hand out for Yaongi and Coco, who come readily to him for rubs now. “Hey, boys. Have you been good for hyung?”

Yaongi meows as if replying, purring loudly with his whole body, and Coco bats at Wonwoo’s fingers for attention. “Hey, be nice, Coco, or no mackerel for you.”

“Oh. Wonwoo-yah, you’re here again, huh?”

His body seizes up. Wonwoo nods silently, folding his body inward even more, withdrawing his hands to himself. His cats whine for attention, but Wonwoo is distracted now, too busy trying to hide in plain sight. It’s the flower-boy.

 

(When Wonwoo had woken up the first time after surgery, he’d been loudly berated by his parents and Bohyuk, who’d all been sitting anxiously in his room for him. Stupid, they’d called him, stupid boy, how could he have gone through with such a risky procedure without even telling anybody?

All Wonwoo could think of was how dry his throat was, like a long drought deep in the earth, where only dust caked him. He tried swallowing, and coughed immediately, weak and dry and painful, like something thick was trying to come back out of him. His mother had immediately broken off her rant and grabbed for the attending nurse, who’d briskly rushed in with a cup of cold water and a small pill cup.

Swallowing tasted bitterly floral, aromatic and sweet through his nose; the nurse said it was a common side-effect to the surgery—an eternal reminder, of sorts, even after removal. Removal of what, Wonwoo didn’t ask, but it was a dumb question when he finally was conscious enough to realize.)

 

Flower-boy owns the cats Wonwoo visits. He’s not actually a boy, just a man who recently finished his university degree, but flower-boy sounds prettier in Wonwoo’s head than flower-man. He’s introduced himself to Wonwoo before, in the way that wasn’t really an introduction but a question in a statement; Wonwoo thinks he did his best to answer, but Flower-boy always sounds so disappointed when he talks to him after the initial hello. It’s one of the reasons why Wonwoo never likes talking to him.

The other reason is that Wonwoo doesn’t know what Flower-boy looks like. He’s a simple man, all things considered, so naming conventions are really just extensions of how Wonwoo sees things: Yaongi for his actual meowing, Coco for the color of his fur, Hana because she is secretly number one in Wonwoo’s heart, and Flower-boy because that’s what Wonwoo literally sees in place of a face.

 

(A girl in Wonwoo’s sophomore year of university had gotten the removal surgery; it’d been over the campus news within days—an unrequited love story that lead her to choosing sanity over wasting away. It wasn’t anything new, to be fair, over half the country’s population chooses to take the removal surgery. Practicality over heartbreak—the Korean motto.

But, he’d been in the campus grounds near the libraries when it’d happened, talking to his classmates. The girl had come across the person she’d fallen in love with, and within minutes, she’d become a ball of hysteria, pointing out at the startled boy with half-screams.

_Why don’t you have a face? Who are you? What is going on? Who’s doing this to me? Stop it!_

It’d taken campus security and an emergency medical squadron ten minutes to come down and sedate her, and the only things she kept repeating were flower names and that he had no face. The boy, completely terrified, had retreated to his dormitory for days, with rumors of him being haunted by unjustified guilt and smashing every visible mirror within his radius.)

 

“How are you doing? How are your shifts at the grocery mart?” Flower-boy asks, trying for conversation. He’s nice about it, at least, shuffling around and grabbing mail from the metal mailbox bolted to the outsides of his apartment complex.

Wonwoo keeps his eyes on the asphalt, hands gripping his knees. Hana rubs against him with a reassuring purr. “It’s been going well. I’m doing well.” His answers are clipped and short, but it’s hard not to be when he feels the suffocating well of camellia petals unfurl in the cave of his throat.

It’s psychosomatic, of course. The roots had been removed ages ago.

“That’s—that’s good, I’m glad.” Flower-boy seems to be struggling to keep the conversation going. “I, uh, I started my new hours at the dance studio. It’s been really fun teaching the kids.”

“Great. You, uh—” Wonwoo swallows, thick and slow, like through a mouthful of molasses, “—you always do great with kids.”

“ _Oh_ , yeah, you—you remember right? The time we had to take care of Seokminie’s kids for the weekend, and how you got so sulky because all four of them liked me better than you?” Flower-boy asks, startled and hopeful, like today’s the day Wonwoo comes out and says it.

Wonwoo’s a kind boy. He’s not a good liar.

“Um, no, I don’t… I’m still not…?” Wonwoo says after a stretched pause, struggling to find the words that would keep Flower-boy happy.

“...Oh.”

Wonwoo steels himself and looks over at Flower-boy, to at least give him the courtesy of facing the person he’s speaking to. He goes slowly, trailing over the half-done sneakers, ties trailing from the tongues of his shoes, the strong legs and the colorful yellow t-shirt and—

Flower-boy’s face without a face. It’s always so disorienting when Wonwoo has enough courage to look at him, the way an open flower the size of a human head sits in place of where Flower-boy’s face should be. The details are always fuzzy, hazy around the soft yellow petals and cream yellow center where eyes and a nose and lips should be. There’s hair—hair and ears that frame the flower head, but Wonwoo can never remember even that when Flower-boy leaves his sight, whether the hair color is brown or black or grey; whether the ears are pink and lined with earrings or sharp with fat lobes.

Wonwoo only ever sees a flower.

 

(It’s an acute form of prosopagnosia. The fusiform gyrus is what processes the face, and what is a body without a face? What is a love without someone to embody it? It was the simplest answer, but the cultural phenomenon never accounted for how the flowers would tie into it.

Trauma doesn’t go away. And in the end, neither do the flowers; they just end up taking the place of what people wanted to forget. It always seemed cruel to Wonwoo when he’d hear stories about it.

It _is_ cruel.)

 

“You… you look nice,” Wonwoo tries, struggling to keep his eyes trained on the petals, centering them to where eyes should probably be. He fails, by how Flower-boy seems to deflate entirely now that Wonwoo’s finally looking at him.

“It’s okay, Wonwoo-yah. You don’t have to force yourself.” It’s not. “I’ll, um, leave you to the cats, huh?”

He looks down finally, to the reasons for his visit. Coco is sprawled on the ground in front of him, uninterested to his inner turmoil, and Yaongi is already preoccupied with the potted plants of a neighboring house a few meters away down the street. Only Hana’s still next to him, purring kindly against him, and Wonwoo gives her a shaky smile, petting down her back gratefully.

“I’m sorry,” he says to Hana. Flower-boy lets out a shaky breath for her.

“Me too, Wonwoo-yah. Me too.”

 

 

(He wanted a lot of things. Maybe that was how it started. Wonwoo wanted, and wanted, but he never reached out for it. Being too scared to face the consequences did that to him—it made him into a coward.

Soonyoung reminded him of yellow. He wore it the color so often, in his sweaters and his shoes and jackets, until Wonwoo could close his eyes at night and see yellow as Kwon Soonyoung. The embodiment of a sun.

When his flowers first appeared, Wonwoo had been half-surprised they weren’t sunflowers. Sunflowers fit Soonyoung better. But, that was always a common misconception. The flowers they manifested weren’t an extension of the person they were in love with: they were an extension of themselves.

It’d been poetic that he’d been lumped with camellias.)

**Author's Note:**

>  **context:** the price of flower-removal is [prosopagnosia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosopagnosia) of the one they'd loved, in the most literal of ways to forget. because hanahaki itself is surrealistic, the trauma of having been rooted is seeing their flowers in place of the memory.
> 
> seriously, don't think too much about it. it's not really science, but it's like a half-assed attempt to try and explain how you could forget someone so definitively. but as everything goes, just because you try to forget, doesn't mean it goes away completely.
> 
> the storyline itself is trite, and i didn't really try to explain their relationship because i'm a lazy fuck so it goes however you want it to? i just really wanted to explore amnesia as a fic trope, but the original idea was a little too eternal sunshine for me, so i veered in2 hanahaki because it was a little more visibly surrealistic?
> 
> also yes, wonwoo sees a giant flower for a head.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [though a change has taken place](https://archiveofourown.org/works/15974510) by [potter](https://archiveofourown.org/users/potter/pseuds/potter)




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